5 Tips for Fair lsle Knitting

[Music] welcome I'm Jana with Pearl together and in this week's video I want to give you five tips for knitting fair isle so you might find these tips especially helpful if you're a beginning fair isle knitter beginning stranded colorwork and if you're about to join us for the Macan for the MRI knit along which will begin New Year's Day 2020 so if you're watching this video in the future and that's long past it doesn't matter these tips are gonna help you out with any feral or stranded colorwork project before we get started with that I want to give a hearty shout out to all my patrons thanks so much for supporting the channel we've got some fun stuff coming up in 2020 and so if you're interested in becoming a patron head on over to patreon comm forward slash Perl together and check out what I'm offering in trade for your pledges I have several tiers of rewards depending on your pledge amount so head on over there and check that out alright tip number one for fair isle knitting use the proper yarn so when you're knitting color work it's super helpful to have your arm that's a little bit grippy or a little hairy if you will it blends together it actually kind of connects to itself and so that's really helpful especially at the beginning of the round where you don't want things pulling apart and becoming all gapi and weird also it just softens and it blooms and it's very nice once you block your project everything melds and blends together and it's just lovely acrylic does not behave that way and while acrylic yarn might be you know less expensive from your local big box store you want to use the proper tool for the proper project and really 100 percent wool is the way to go for color work knitting can you get by with acrylic well sure but it's gonna be more slippery it's gonna be harder to deal with harder to hold and it's not gonna behave the same way particularly if you're doing a project that's going to require sneaking where you knit something in the round and then you literally cut later now I haven't done that yet but I've seen it done several times and I can see where it would be definitely advantageous to use 100% wool that sticks together now the other reason is if you had to tear out a section or you had a frog a little bit or you drop a stitch it's gonna stay put the wall particularly that we are suggesting for the upcoming knit along is from Shetland it's a hundred percent Shetland wool that breed of sheep is very very Hardy and the characteristics of the wool itself are that it maintains its shape well so if you dropped a stitch that Lupe's gonna be there waiting for you it doesn't just all collapse into a puddle okay let me back up a little bit if you drop a stitch or you have to tink back there's not a lot and I have yet to figure out a good technique for if you drop a stitch how to ladder up you know you in color work that's more complicated than just straight up knitting so you want a yarn that sticks to itself better so it doesn't ladder as quickly you definitely want it that loop if you drop something to be just waiting for you patiently until you're able to retrieve it so the proper yarn for the proper project is important here so I am using for my project for the Macan for the MRI the Harriet's Hat projects I'm using Jameson's and Smith's and I'll put links down below you can use Jameson's of Shetland there's also a domestic or us-based 100% wool for Morehouse farms you can use that as well ghost ash diving and see what you have tip number two swatc swatching this super important knitting fair isle is not the same as regular knitting it's not the same as knitting back and forth you're gonna want to knit a little tube you're gonna want to knit a little cylinder if you're knitting a hat or something that's color work it's all different definitely take the time to swatch knit yourself a little cylinder or a little cuff and my friend Anne frost over at I thought I knew how podcasts she has a youtube channel which we'll put the link down below she has some very helpful tips for swatching so definitely go check that out use the technique that works for you but if it works best for you to you know knit one hand knit with you if your right hand knit her and you're used to throwing and knitting english-style then do that and if you need just drop your yarn and pick it back up for the contrasting color yes that's a little slower but that's okay we're not Speed Racer here if you need to do that that's totally fine if you're comfortable knitting English style with you one hand and continental with the other hand then yeah that might be a little more quick but you want to be careful of your tension and so absolutely you'll want to swatch so that's tip number two is use the technique that works for you and I'm going to demonstrate that here and so I can hold this over here like I'm knitting continental where I have both of these in one hand and that works pretty well except let me tell you what happens with me is I start going along and I do my three of the background-color and now it's time for me to knit a couple stitch three of these so I can go in and knit continental and pick that off my middle finger and that works just fine for a little while but what happens with me I noticed this left finger starts to stretch out and out and it extends and then it gets uncomfortable and then I'll notice my hands starting to get tired and fatigued here so while that might work for you I'm I'm really not that good at controlling the tension with my left hand I'm not a crochet I I don't really have practiced that what actually works best for me is a technique I saw on a video from Arne and Carlos and it's where he just goes like this and I you know he might work it weave it in and out like that on his fingers and he just picks it right off his index finger and he doesn't you know he doesn't extend that up so far and he just picks it right off his index finger like that which to me it keeps everything it causes less fatigue in my hands and it keeps everything closer in and that's okay for a while too but let me show you what I have kind of arrived at for myself at least for now so here I need to alternate a little bit so there's another dark stitch and what I've been doing I noticed that this yarn always falls off so I'm like well okay that's fine so I just let it fall off and I let it come along behind and that actually helps to control some of the tension along the back right it's kind of carry this along the edge along behind I'm making sure that I also have enough yarn here that my floats aren't puckering and so I've been just laying the yarn between my ring finger and my middle finger and just bringing you that along behind I think I do it over the top not sure I bring that along behind oh that's how I do it I bring that along behind and then when it's time I just go in as if to knit like normal and then I actually lift up my left hand and I just wrap it around and that's been working for me pretty well actually and I'm you know you can feel the yarn sliding through my left hand along the back it's just sliding through my fingers and I go in as if to knit and I just wrap it just wrap I just go up and around in a counterclockwise just like a normal knit stitch so you my only point here is what you'll arrive at what works best for you you just need to practice this a little bit and see see what makes the most sense so I just picked that up and I'm just wrapping it around and I know that's a little cumbersome to take your hands up off your work and do that but I have found it for me that results in the best tension so far tip number four when you're working your pattern you'll definitely want to mark the edges of the chart repeat so if that's every 16 stitches every 18 stitches whatever pattern you're using put markers and the reason that's so important with fair isle is because it's not so easy to fix when you mess up like if you had a stitch that was the wrong color it's not as easy to drop down and change things around in the same way that if you're knitting a regular hat in the round with just regular yarn in one color you could easily drop down and fix a purl that should have been a knit or vice versa it's not so easy to do that with fair isle so if you have a chart repeat that's 18 stitches and you mess up and maybe you should have knitted three stitches in the pattern color and you should have knitted four stitches in the background color and you have reversed that in your mind you've only done 18 stitches it's not that far to tink back and fix that so after you knit one chart repeat double check that it's correct and if it isn't you're not so far away that you can't just tink back in like 20 seconds and fix it right way better than noticing a mistake way down several rows below that actually then you're either going to rip a lot or you're gonna leave it and fix it with a duplicate stitch later on it's better to just to avoid those little errors from the get-go okay so check between the markers as you go as for weaving in the ends there is you know there's always this ongoing thing about well do you want to knit your ends in or do you want to weave them in so my last tip for you today is weaving in the ends afterward and I'm gonna show you why okay what I want to illustrate here is this is my beginning of the round I have a gold marker here that's the beginning of the round now you can see down on here things are okay for tension and I have all these tails hanging out and that's that's alright you don't need to be worried about that at all that's totally okay but if you notice you have a little bit of a gap here you can go in underneath and find that corresponding tail of the red for example and just give that a little tug to adjust the tension and to kind of suck that back together now if you have followed along with some other channels or you've seen the way that I did the Inara wrap for example when we were changing colors every couple of rows I did show how I like to weave in the end of the color change as I went along now that was on an edge of a shawl which is quite different than knitting in the round and I found what happened when I tried when I started the white here I knit it in the end or I weave it in in the same way that you'd catch a float and it left a hole because what happens when you do that is it kind of unless you're super careful to leave a lot of slack you may have this stitch being pulled to the left and so that does create a gap here now I will go back with a darning needle and find exactly where that is back here and loosen everything up and correct that tension before I block it but I would suggest the weaving in the ends afterward so that you can adjust any tension necessary and take care of that later rather than trying to weave them in as you go which is I mean I realized that it's more popular to weave it in maybe as you go because you're thinking well that's gonna be less work later however you definitely don't want to have any gaps like I have here I you know an egg that's easily fixed but I'd rather not have to fix something I would rather just go in and weave everything in later the other advantage to that besides being able to adjust any attention issues along here is that you know if things tend to shift a little bit if you have one row that's knitted more tightly than another and you're not sure about the blocking by waiting you know if things shift by waiting you have some ease or some slack to move things around with blocking as well if you have not already knitted in all those tails you might have a you know a problem that's exacerbated if you after blocking if you weave in ends now you know but again if you want to try that I'm not saying don't try it because you're the boss of your knitting but just know that you might have to take a darning needle and go back and like pull that out a little bit and then either you know do a duplicate stitch over the gap or something to mitigate that little hole that I have there so it just seems safer to me as a bee as a newer fair isle knitter to weave them in properly afterwards and be able to adjust any potential cabbage I hope you found those five tips helpful consider hitting that thumbs up button subscribing to the channel and head on over to patreon comm forward slash Perl together if you're interested in seeing what I'm offering in terms of rewards for your pledge of just a few dollars a month thanks again for watching [Music]

Channel: Purl Together

Views: 112,834

Keywords: fair isle knitting, stranded colorwork, color knitting

Id: fNkyI-oaT2U

Length: 12min 31sec (751 seconds)

Published: Sat Dec 28 2019